


Jaime Lannister and the conga line of terror

by angel_deux



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Halloween, Haunted Houses, Jaime being all fluttery over how big Brienne is, What else is new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 17:04:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21256682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Jaime thought that going to an amusement park with a bunch of haunted houses might be kind of fun.It isn't. Turns out he's terrified of them.Luckily, Brienne is with him.





	Jaime Lannister and the conga line of terror

**Author's Note:**

> this is loosely based on the fact that when i was in middle school, my dad used to take me and my sister and our family friends to an amusement park in our area that always had these haunted houses set up, and I always used it as an excuse to stand in line near the friend I had a crush on. 
> 
> Also, we went to one of these places in college, and my friend took off running, abandoning his girlfriend, who I barely knew at the time, and who was literally crying she was so afraid. I had to lead her through the maze by the hand, telling her when all the scares were coming, because she was too afraid to open her eyes. Somehow, those two are still happily married, but she brings it up at least twice a year that i protected her, so. Those two things together formed this fic lmao.

Jaime Lannister cultivated a very careful image in high school. Or, well, his sister Cersei cultivated it _for_ him. Jaime just lived in the parameters she laid out.

His twin sister has always been more socially minded, so it just made sense to follow her lead. Jaime learned from his father how to be polite and talk about Manly Things with business associates. Things like hunting or stocks or whatever. Jaime always learned enough to avoid embarrassing his father at social functions, though he had no real interest. His mother taught him to be kind and generous. She always took time to explain to him why something he said was mean, or rude, even if he hadn’t intended for it to be. His siblings mostly taught him that he wouldn’t ever be as clever as they were, socially speaking, because they’re so effortlessly good at being themselves and using that in very clever ways, and Jaime never had the talent. Not that he _wanted_ it, but still. When he was younger, it just made sense to play along and be whatever Cersei wanted him to be.

Cersei’s Jaime, High School Jaime, was brave. He was practically fearless. He laughed at everything: this drawling, sarcastic, kind of dickish laugh. He played football even though he hated the rest of the guys on the team. He casually dated girls Cersei set him up with, though he had no real interest in them and never lasted more than a few weeks before giving up. He hid his dyslexia. He compensated for his academic shortcomings by being at Cersei’s side in the center of every bit of high school drama. The Lannister twins were feared and admired and lusted after, and that was exactly what Cersei wanted.

College Jaime, though, is a different story. First, he takes a few years off before actually _going_ to college, so he’s a freshman at the same time as his little brother, Tyrion. The decision infuriated his father, and it displeased Cersei, but Joanna was supportive, the way she always was.

“Leave him be,” she said to Tywin gently at dinner one night, back in high school, after Jaime announced that he wanted to take a few years off. “Let him figure his own life out.”

Eventually, he was ready, and he displeased Cersei further by choosing not to apply to her school in Dorne, instead deciding to follow Tyrion. Cersei felt too far removed, at that point. She had all new friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and she was always talking about people he didn’t know, and it made him feel weirdly anxious. It felt safer to go with Tyrion. To stick with his little brother. Cling, maybe a little unhealthily, to High School Jaime as much as possible.

Except Jaime quickly found that College Jaime was nothing like High School Jaime had been.

* * *

College Jaime, for one, is immensely insecure about his age, being two years older than the rest of his classmates. Literally no one cares, because people his age are everywhere on campus and it’s not like he’s _that old_, but _Jaime_ cares. He cares that he’s struggling in easy freshman level classes that Tyrion breezes through. It’s tough to get back into academics after two years of traveling and working and being excited that he didn’t have to write any more fucking papers.

Then, Tyrion mentions Jaime’s dyslexia once in their group of friends, and then it’s just…out there. They all know about something that High School Jaime’s friends never did.

When he tries to get back into sports, he finds he _still_ hates football and isn’t as good as he used to be, and then he breaks his arm in several places during a bad tackle, and that puts an end to it, and his continued lack of strength in his right arm becomes another thing for him to be insecure about. He has to get glasses, and he decides to grow his hair out, and he grows a bit of a beard on the advice of his friend Sansa, and then he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks that Cersei would hate him if she saw him. He doesn’t look like High School Jaime at all.

Luckily, Cersei’s away in Dorne, and they text much more than they Skype, but it still makes him feel strange to no longer be his sister’s mirror.

* * *

College Jaime meets Sansa Stark in a history class. They bond over knowing too much about Age of Heroes legends, having both been long obsessed with the image of gallant knights and their swooning damsels. Sansa is actually the one who tells him he might need glasses, because he keeps reading her notes because he can’t see the board. Tyrion assumes Jaime’s got a crush on her at first, but really Jaime’s just jazzed to have made a friend that wasn’t through his siblings. Sure, it turns out that Tyrion already knew Sansa because they live on the same dorm floor, but it’s still an accomplishment. High School Jaime never made his own friends.

* * *

By the time their sophomore year rolls around, College Jaime has another problem that High School Jaime never encountered: Brienne Tarth.

He starts hanging out with Brienne through Sansa, because Brienne is friends with Sansa’s older brother Robb. But he _met_ Brienne in one of his first classes freshman year, when he was still mostly High School Jaime, and he had gotten defensive and shitty about something she said, and she had gotten defensive in return.

If she wasn’t already friends with the Stark siblings, that’s probably where it would have ended. Instead, she becomes part of College Jaime’s larger friend group, and she’s always around, and so Jaime has to constantly reckon with the fact that she plainly doesn’t like him. _Still_. Oh, she tolerates him. She’s polite to him. But that first impression of his shittiness stuck, and he doesn’t know how to make it go away. High School Jaime never had to deal with people who didn’t like him. Cersei was so sharp and so quick to weed out dissenters. If Brienne had said something sarcastic under her breath about him, Cersei would have zeroed in on her and ripped her apart. But Jaime’s not Cersei, and Tyrion’s not Cersei, and so when Brienne rolls her eyes or mutters something about Jaime’s rudeness, Jaime just sort of swallows it.

He feels guilty, mostly, because now that he knows her better, he knows that she probably thinks he’s just like any of a thousand people like him who have made her feel bad about her looks. She _is_ rather large and ugly, but she has the kind of face that’s easy to get used to. Her eyes are beautiful, and he finds the patterns of her freckles endlessly fascinating, but mostly she’s just so kind and sturdy that it makes her nice to look at. Not aesthetically, maybe, and sometimes when he looks at her he remembers what he used to see. But he likes her so much that looking at her makes him happy. Maybe it doesn’t make her “beautiful”, like physically beautiful, but doesn’t that kind of count? Isn’t it the same feeling?

Not that he’d ever tell her that. She would probably think he was making fun of her, first of all, and she would also probably _sprint_ in the other direction. He knows she thinks he’s good looking, because she has mentioned it in bored tones as if attractive is the least interesting thing a person can be. But she also thinks he’s a useless, empty-headed jerk. Even if she _did _believe that he liked her, she’d never actually want him. Maybe to _fuck_, but Jaime doesn’t want to just fuck her. He wants to, like, watch movies with her. Snuggle with her. Hug her. Stupid shit. Brienne would never want that with him. Even two weeks ago, he overheard her calling him “your rich pretty boy” to Sansa in a tone of disdain. She regards Jaime like he’s some non-person, some moron who trails after Sansa. Like a cat-lover irritated by her friend’s yet-to-be-housebroken puppy. No one has ever managed to make Jaime feel quite so insecure. Well, maybe Tywin. Well, fine, maybe Cersei. But other than that.

He wants her to like him, but he has no idea how to make it happen. When he _tries_, it seems to make her suspicious. When he doesn’t try, she seems determined to take every single thing he says in the exact wrong way. He wants to ask Tyrion or Sansa for advice, but he’s far too embarrassed. It shouldn’t matter so much what one friend thinks of him. Their friend group is large enough! Most of them think he’s fine! Most of them even seem to enjoy his company! So why is he so bent on impressing the one person who doesn’t? Is it just the challenge of it?

* * *

The biggest way in which High School Jaime differs from College Jaime is, apparently, that College Jaime is a fucking coward.

He doesn’t realize this at first. Maybe High School Jaime would have reacted the same. It’s hard to say. But Halloween is rapidly approaching, and Tyrion suggests taking a little road trip to Harrenhall, where every year they set up a bunch of haunted houses for people to walk through and get scared by.

“Sure,” Jaime says, having never been to one before—Cersei would never have agreed to go to a place where the primary objective was to make her scream and look a bit foolish for a few seconds. “That sounds fun.”

Except then he’s _there_, getting out of the car with Sansa and Tyrion, meeting up with Robb and Brienne and Theon and the rest of their friends. It’s already dark, and the air is filled with recordings of ghosts moaning and zombies growling and owls hooting and witches cackling. The houses have been constructed in the shadows of the old, supposedly haunted castle, and it looms over everything and should make the makeshift amusement park houses look ramshackle and pathetic, but it doesn’t. Actually, they look pretty realistic. One at the end is a giant clown. Its gaping mouth is the entrance.

_Oh_, Jaime thinks, suddenly._ I don’t think I like this._

It’s an odd sensation, to discover that you’re afraid of something. Just going about your life, not knowing about it, and suddenly realizing that you’ve got little shivers in your spine when you think about doing something. The idea of going into those haunted houses is like that. He follows the group towards the gate, where they have to fork over a bunch of money just to allow some underpaid employees to try and make them piss themselves, and Jaime is already starting to sweat.

He hides it, of course. What’s he going to do? Ruin everyone’s night and refuse to go in? Maybe he’s just being a baby. Maybe he’ll be fine. 

* * *

So, they go through the first haunted house, which is right past the gate. They have to walk straight through in order to get to the rest of the attractions, and he definitely is _not_ fine. By the time they’re through to the other side, everyone has laughed at him at least once because he jumped and yelled at everything, even some things that weren’t meant to be scary.

Everyone else seems scared in a fun way. They all shrieked with him and jumped with him, but now they’re giggly and breathless and giddy with adrenaline, and Jaime’s the only one literally shaking. How is this _fun _for them?

“Come on!” Sansa says, tugging him along to get in line for the next one.

There are, like, twelve separate haunted houses. Are they going to make him go through _all of them_?

He drags his feet just a little, and Sansa releases his hand to run ahead with Margaery. Jaime finds himself trying to calculate the best possible place in line to be. He knows he doesn’t want to be at the front. Closer to the back is probably good, but not the _very_ back. He needs at least one person behind him, just in case any of those kids in masks try to follow him. Tyrion marches straight to the front of the pack, pushing through peoples’ legs, marshaling their friends into an orderly tangle so they can be ready when their turn comes. “The first one was just the introduction”, someone’s saying. “The rest are much scarier”.

Jaime might actually faint. That might actually happen.

“Brienne, you’re tallest, so you should take up the rear,” Tyrion says, to which Brienne gives a very staid thumbs-up. Jaime finds himself standing just in front of her. And, actually, that might be the best place to be. She’s solid behind him. She isn’t much taller than him normally, but she’s taller than usual because she’s wearing boots with a thick heel, and she’s got broad shoulders enclosed in a coat that makes her seem even larger. Maybe hiding behind her would be good, but her weight at his back seems comforting. When it’s their turn to go in, the high school kid in the face paint who lets them in tells them to hold on to the person in front of them and not let go for anything. “Like a conga line of terror”, he says, deadpan. Jaime latches on to Sansa, and Brienne’s warm hands settle onto his hips.

_Oh,_ Jaime thinks. _This is kind of nice._

The haunted house itself is a fucking nightmare, of course. Brienne keeps crowding him forward and Sansa keeps pulling him, so he has no choice but to walk, but he keeps lurching backward and into Brienne anytime anything scares him.

The basic point of this particular haunted house seems to be making everyone as disoriented as possible, because there are dark rooms painted with neon paint and rooms painted to look smaller than they really are and there are dark passageways with no light except for the green glowstick crown that Tyrion has given himself as leader of the pack. It makes sense that they made sure to warn them to hold on, and Jaime’s grateful for it, because he isn’t sure he could keep moving on his own. Every time they walk around a corner, he cringes back.

Once, laughing, Brienne’s mouth very close to his ear says, “you have to keep walking, Jaime,” and Jaime jumps near out of his skin with embarrassment and surprise both.

After, outside, his knees are weak, and he’s upsettingly untethered from the whole experience. Like he’s just going through the motions, and someone else is controlling him. Sansa shrieks and hugs him and says, “wasn’t that amazing?” and he just smiles and nods and feels like a bigger coward than ever. He thought Sansa, at least, would be as scared as he is. Or half as scared, even.

Tyrion leads the charge to the next attraction, which thank the _gods_ is just a pumpkin carving display. Sansa and her roommate Margaery linger over them to get inspiration for their own pumpkins, and Jaime gratefully follows them, pretending to care much more about all this than he does, trying to delay the next haunted house as long as possible. Tyrion and Robb and Theon go to grab some food, and Margaery’s brother and his boyfriend go to find the costume contest they wanted to enter.

Jaime’s pretending to examine a variety of pumpkin carvings that all seem to be about aliens when he feels Brienne behind him.

“You want this?” she asks him. He turns to look, and she’s holding out a cup.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Some kind of pumpkin cocoa. I thought I’d like it, but it’s too sweet for me.”

Jaime frowns and takes the cup, giving it a tentative sip. It’s good, he thinks. It’s not very sweet at all.

“Thanks,” he says. He’s afraid to say anything else and scare her off. She smiles at him, showing a little bit of her teeth, which she usually doesn’t do.

“Sure,” she says. She starts to leave, then hesitates and turns back to him. “You’re like…really scared in there, aren’t you?”

“I know it’s not real,” he says. Defensiveness rises within him, but he tramps down on it. Defensiveness got him into this weird hybrid non-friendship with Brienne in the first place, and she just gave him her cocoa. He won’t gain anything by being a dick. It’s not like she doesn’t _know_. “I’m just scared anyway,” he admits. Brienne’s expression briefly softens.

“You don’t have to go through them, you know,” she says. “You can just hang out out here.”

“Tyrion would never let me hear the end of it,” Jaime says, and Brienne nods. Admitting it.

“All right,” she says.

* * *

Brienne is behind him in the next attraction, too. Her hands are firm on his hips, and they squeeze comfortingly every time he jumps. Once, when Sansa bowls back into him, trying to get away from a masked teenager who just jumped out at them, Brienne balances him by moving one arm to wrap across his chest, and Jaime feels his heart slamming into his ribcage and slamming against her strong forearm, and literally nothing else matters for the next 3.5 seconds until he remembers to breathe.

When they get out of that one, he finds himself glancing at Brienne as she laughs and jokes with the rest of them. She seems utterly unbothered, and he feels like perhaps he should be more embarrassed to be so affected, but he feels, instead, kind of nice. She doesn’t mention how afraid Jaime is to anyone else. She smiles at him a bit when she catches his eye. He smiles back.

It goes on like that for a while. He isn’t any less scared, but he endures it with Brienne’s help. There’s a particularly bad one that involves a whole _butcher _theme, and there’s all this cackling laughter and the sounds of chainsaws, and Brienne more than once whispers in his ear that they’re coming up to a jumpscare, being tall enough and observant enough to spot the lurking teens behind the false walls. At one point there’s this room that’s all blood-covered and gross and involves a wailing actor pretending they’ve been cut in half, and Brienne jokingly covers his eyes with one warm hand, and he laughs and tries not to feel stupidly, pathetically pleased by her chuckle in his ear.

* * *

It’s all starting to feel routine, and he can at least _deal _with it. But then they get to the second-to-last attraction, and it isn’t a house at all. It leads them on a winding wooded path straight towards the old castle.

“Oh, fuck me,” he says to Brienne. “That ones actually haunted!”

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Brienne replies dryly.

“What, you don’t believe in ghosts?” Jaime asks. She laughs at him, but it isn’t disdainful, like it had been when she called him a rich prettyboy.

“Of course I don’t,” she says. “Jaime!”

“Are you scared of _anything_?” Jaime wonders incredulously. Her smile fades.

“Of course I am,” she says. “Just not stupid stuff.”

And, well. There it is. The disdain back again. Jaime sighs and shoves down his annoyance.

“Whatever,” he says. He turns to find Sansa, but Brienne stops him. She takes his arm. Gently but firmly. Enough to stop him in his tracks.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “That was rude. I just…get defensive.”

“Me too,” he says.

“Guys!” Sansa yells. “Come on!”

* * *

Jaime’s expecting the same slow pace, the same Conga Line of Terror. But nobody tells them to put their hands anywhere. Nobody gives them any instructions. They just send them on their way, and so Tyrion gleefully hurries ahead, and so does everyone else, running and shrieking and jumping at shadows long before there are any actual scares, leaving Jaime trailing behind with horror, trying to keep up but finding himself left behind anyway.

Except, of course, for Brienne. She sidles up next to him, and she reaches into the space between them, and she takes his hand. Hers are as big as his, and they’re warm.

“Come on,” she says. “I’ll protect you.”

* * *

He follows her and hides behind her and clings to her arm until it must be losing circulation. She jumps and screams more at _his_ constant jumping and screaming, and he’s still literally shaking and feels like he wants to die, but her laughter and her amusement don’t feel disgusted or disdainful now. Everything she says to him feels _affectionate,_ and he finds that he can’t stop lapping it up.

(Also, it’s worth noting that hanging onto her arm like a damsel in distress allows him to feel how strong she is, and it turns out he kind of likes that. Or really likes that. Or whatever.)

* * *

“We don’t have to go into this last one,” Brienne says. They stand together looking at the giant clown mouth in front of them. Tyrion is hammimg it up with one of the employees wandering around dressed as more-terrifying-than-usual clowns. Sansa is giggling as one of them sneaks up on Robb to surprise him. Brienne is looking at all of it with distaste. Her arms are folded across her chest.

“You’re scared of clowns,” Jaime guesses immediately, and she glares at him. “Oh, gods. We _have_ to go now.”

“_What_? Jaime!”

“I faced my fears like thirty thousand times today, and you literally held my hand through it. Let me reclaim a little dignity.”

“You can reclaim your dignity on your own,” Brienne says, narrowing her eyes.

“Without my protector?” he asks. She frowns even more deeply, looking at him like she’s trying to figure out if he’s serious. He wishes she could tell how little of his joking is actual joking. “Maybe I can protect you, this time.”

He holds out his hand to her, and she eyes it suspiciously, and she hesitates, but then she takes it.

* * *

Turns out Jaime’s a bit afraid of clowns too, but it’s nothing compared to the way Brienne reacts. She’s so big, and her voice is so loud, so maybe it just _seems_ like a lot. She’s a nervous laugher, too. That’s Jaime’s favorite part. Normally when she laughs it’s quiet, basically a snicker or a fond chuckle, but after she’s been scared by some clown and has deafened everyone with her scream, she transitions into this loud, unselfconscious laugh as she clings to Jaime’s arm, and Jaime can’t stop laughing with her.

“Seven hells,” he says after a clown has jumped out at them from behind a neon-painted wall and Brienne has done her usual screaming thing. “All right, Brie. Stay behind me. Close your eyes. Try not to break any more glass in here with your screaming.”

She laughs again, and he laughs helplessly along with her, and by the time they’re out and back in the main lot with the others, they’re both wiping tears from their eyes.

Everyone’s talking and laughing and enjoying themselves, and it takes Jaime a few moments before he realizes that he and Brienne are still holding hands.

_Oh_, he thinks, for a third time tonight. _Huh. This is kind of nice. _

He makes eye contact with her, and he’s nervous that she’s going to take her hand back, so he squeezes it, reflexively. She’s looking back at him, smiling softly. She doesn’t take her hand out of his.

“I’ll walk you back to the parking lot,” she says. “Keep you safe.” He can tell that she’s nervous about making the joke, and he smiles. His own nerves are still clamoring, but if he faced down a dozen haunted houses, he can face down this.

“You never know what might pop out,” he agrees, and he moves closer to her. She still looks at least a little disbelieving, and she bites her lip. He doesn’t think he’s going to kiss her yet, tonight. But now he knows it’s only a matter of time.


End file.
